When I first moved this blog from wordpress.com to its own domain, I thought, hey, there’s a chance I could make some money on this. Maybe not a lot of money, but hopefully enough to cover the $20 a year I pay for the domain name. (Fortunately, the hosting is free; thanks again to Rob Heath for the help.) And who knows, maybe it’ll be like the lottery, except with a lot more work involved.

But that’s not how it works. The Internet is made for niches. Find a niche, cover it in detail: obsessively catalog everything about your favorite TV show or sports team or video game. Then watch the search engines direct the traffic to you. I get a fair amount of search traffic (compared to what I get from direct traffic and links from facebook, twitter, and other blogs), but it’s an interesting, very scattered mix.

And that just covers getting people to your website; niche sites also have a huge advantage in targeting ads to their users. If I blogged exclusively about golf equipment, I’d probably have a bunch of ads about golf equipment, and people who searched the internet for information about golf equipment and ended up at my site might very well click an ad. But when you have a site about Glee and Saints football and punctuation marks no computer (and likely no human, either) is going to be able to make any sense out of it. It’s not a good recipe for advertising.

In going through the legalese of the Adsense agreement, I had first thought I couldn’t reveal how much money I make. It turns out that I “may accurately disclose the amount of Google’s gross payments to You pursuant to the Program.” The payments? None, because you have to accrue $100 in revenues to get a check from Google. And even if I decide to cancel, I need to reach $10 in revenue for Google to send me money. Where am I at right now? 76 cents from roughly 7600 hits on my site. 76 cents. Surely my blog is worth more than that, isn’t it?

But let’s face it. People hate ads on the Internet. I don’t know anybody who regularly clicks on the damn things, and yet somehow Google has made $80 bazillion dollars on Internet advertising. I mean, think about it: do you ever click ads? Every now and then a worthwhile one will show up in my Gmail account or on Facebook. After all, they’re datamining everything about my damn life, they had better be able to target ads well enough to get me to click. But on a site I come across either directly or by search traffic? Roughly never. And yet somehow there’s a fortune to be made.

Finally, if I’m going to bitch about Internet advertising, I might as well add in a few pet peeves: I can’t stand pop-ups. Or ads that play sound automatically. (Which reminds me: I need to get a Chrome plug-in to kill ESPN.com’s autopsy feature. That annoys the crap out of me.) Or anything that resizes my windows. Or anything that delays me from getting to the website I want to visit. Or commercials during online TV shows.

It’s pretty ridiculous how much of an average TV show is advertising. According to Wikipedia, commercials used to take up nine minutes of an hour-long program in the 1960s. Now they take up roughly eighteen minutes an hour. That’s almost a third of the show. Since modern TV shows are written to fit into the contours of commercial breaks, watching them isn’t usually too annoying; sure, it’s nicer to fast-forward through the commercials if you can, but I can stomach sitting through the commercials. What annoys the crap out of me is having to watch a sporting event or movie that gets interrupted every ten minutes for a commercial. Many movies feel completely disjointed when they’re edited and cut up for television. And besides, I have an extremely short attention span, so I usually change the channel, watch something else until a commercial comes on, then flip back to the movie to find I’ve missed some major plot point. Whoops. I love watching a movie on TCM or Fox Movie Channel or HBO or whatever, where I get to see the whole thing straight through. But AMC or some other commercial-laden network? Forget it.

And sports? Sure, some sports (baseball, for example) have plenty of natural stopping points for a brief commercial break. But I hate the way in which football and basketball games get stopped every few minutes by TV timeouts. If I could go back in time and change one thing about American sports, I’d make it like soccer where teams whore themselves out with advertising on jerseys and all over the stadia in exchange for getting to see a game without commercials.* I’d love it if we got rid of TV timeouts every four minutes in college basketball; just show a 30-second commercial each time a team calls a timeout. And who doesn’t hate the touchdown-commercial-kickoff-commercial pattern so common in NFL games? And to throw in an example from another sport, DirecTV offers a couple of channels of bonus coverage for all of the Grand Slam events in golf and tennis. And for the recent British Open** golf tournament, they had something I hadn’t seen before on one of the extra channels—an international feed, completely commercial free. (Also, on a somewhat unrelated note, it was also blissfully free of the stupid feature stories, lengthy interviews, and talking-heads segments that ESPN felt compelled to shove down our throats. I tried watching ESPN a few times and several times I went 20 minutes without seeing more than one or two actual golf shots.) And every time the Olympics rolls around, NBC has to scramble to fit advertising into team sport telecasts that lack commercial breaks. I enjoyed watching hockey in the Olympics; there was a wonderful flow to the games (thanks to the lack of TV timeouts) that’s completely missing from an NHL broadcast.

I realize that the business model of television requires lots of ads. But I think it’s fair to say that with the Internet and DVRs, the model is shifting. Probably we’ll be seeing a lot more product placement and on-screen advertising graphics, as TV executives realize how many ads are being skipped over. And hopefully this somehow leads to a world where I don’t have to see 20 minutes of ads an hour.

* Actually, if I could change one thing about sports, I’d probably require that all teams be fan-owned enterprises that are concerned with winning, not with turning a profit. But that’s not exactly feasible, I suppose.

** Yes, I am aware that the proper name is “The Open Championship.” Now shut up, Anglophiles.

Now, that’s why I started out. I had a little tiny wordpress.com site. Then a friend of mine from high school showed it to one of his co-worker who said he could host it for me (that co-worker is the man behind Movie Crematorium). So I bought the thingskevinhates.com domain name and started dreaming of fame and fortune. I imagined myself raking in the dough from a few ads on my page.* Of being a media pundit. Of holding court on various issues, with my opinion well respected by thousands of followers all over the world. And most of all, I dreamed of…a book deal.

Now, I suppose one could argue that a magazine column would be more plausible, but I don’t think you could get advances or royalty checks for those. So fuck that. I want a book deal. So many fucking blogs have book deals it’s ridiculous. This 2004—holy crap that’s a long time ago in the online world—New Yorker article details the start of the blogs-to-book movement, with an enterprising 27-year-old agent-in-waiting named Kate Lee working at International Creative Management and scouring the web for bloggers who could become the next best-selling author. This trend exploded, to the point where stuffwhitepeoplelike.com could get a $300,000 book deal. Six motherfucking figures. It’s funny stuff, don’t get me wrong, but $300k? The anti-hipster brigade is raking in the book deals left and right. LATFH has one. Stuff Hipsters Hate has one. I’ve done the whole anti-hipster thing, but there are so many other things in the world to hate: why should I limit myself?

Then there’s 1000awesomethings.com, which is an ode to life’s little pleasures and is largely devoted to nostalgia, leftovers, and observational humor. Not that there’s anything wrong with those things—again, it’s a funny site—but if he can get a book deal, why can’t I?

I could sit here all day listing blogs that have gotten book deals; Mashable.com has an article with interviews from six people who have pulled it off. Sure, there’s a lot of great blogs out there. And maybe they’re better than mine. But where else can you get such a broad array of topics from the same person? Unfortunately, that’s my problem. I don’t have a niche. I write about everything. All the advice about blogs says to find a niche. Fuck niches. The world has too many people with their heads up the asses of whatever niche they’re in. Sure, my blog has a gimmick—you gotta get a gimmick—but it doesn’t have a niche. Also, I think if I had a book deal, I’d probably have to cut out all the musical theatre references that people wouldn’t understand. But I’m totally okay with dumbing things down for a mass audience.** Selling out is A-OK by me. I’ve got some standards, to be sure, but not many.

Unfortunately, it’s not as easy to sell out as one might hope. I’m not really sure what the process is; it seems like most bloggers have gained fame on the web, then been approached by agents or publishers. But I think I need a few million hits for that to happen. So tell your friends to read my blog, dammit! If I can get nine people to tell nine people, and then they tell nine people, and so on, pretty soon I could have 525,600 people reading my blog.***

I’ve also thought about taking a trip to New York and just barging in on the offices of every agent who does these blog-to-book deals. There’s a handful of them: I already mentioned Kate Lee; Erin Malone is the agent at William Morris behind the deals for Stuff White People Like and 1000 Awesome Things; Kate McKean represents Ben Huh, the man who owns icanhascheezburger, the fail blog, and others; and Hannah Brown Gordon made deals with LATFH and Animal Review.**** The romanticized notion of New York makes me think that anyone can come from anywhere, go straight up to a person of authority in one’s chosen profession, and win a job out of sheer pluck.

But I doubt it really works like that. It just sounds creepy, to be honest. Maybe I can just hunt these agents down on twitter, follow their feeds, hope they notice my distinctive icon—I’m amazed at how well the “no” sign works at 31 pixels square—visit my blog, see it as a work of genius, sign up to represent me, then march off to Random House or Penguin or whatever and get me a five- or six-figure advance. Unfortunately this sounds just as implausible as the previous paragraph, and cyberstalking is only marginally less creepy than actual stalking. And this strategy would work better if I had more twitter followers. So follow me on twitter! And tell your friends to follow me on twitter! I can’t exactly make my blog go viral by myself. In short, dear readers, I need your help. Tell your friends, especially if your friends own publishing companies. Come up with some clever guerrilla marketing campaign. Maybe I can scrawl thingskevinhates graffiti all over every building I can find—okay, that’s probably not a good idea. Homemade t-shirts with sharpie marker on cheap white tees from Wal-Mart? Okay, probably not a good idea either. That’s why I need your help! Spread the word about my site. What do you get in return? Your friends will love you for introducing them to my awesome site. Win-win if you ask me. (Although if I actually do manage to get a book deal, it’s more like hugely awesome win for me, very minor insignificant win for you. Sorry.)

* Unfortunately, it’s apparently not that easy to come by thousands of dollars in ad revenue. Or hundreds of dollars. Or dollars.

** Sure, most of my current readers probably understand the reference I just made to Gypsy, or my post about Cats, but when I start talking about obscure Broadway shows with tiny cult followings, I may lose a few readers.

*** See what I mean? Fortunately that reference was cryptic enough that the people who don’t know what I’m talking about might’ve just thought that was clever and random. Whereas you, the intelligent reader who understood the reference, may now bask in the glow of the smug satisfaction that comes from catching a reference that hardly anyone understands. Now you know how those people who like movies feel when they read Bill Simmons’s columns.

**** Animal Review (which, unsurprisingly, reviews animals) has a hit counter showing a mere 257,764 hits. I can get to that number. That doesn’t mean I’d have a book deal, but I can aspire to that number of hits. I’m over 7k including both thingskevinhates.com and the old wordpress.com. Only 250k to go.

1. Don’t buy a ridiculously expensive house and assume it’ll just keep going up in value. Look at this jack-ass who just happens to be the financial reporter for the New York Times. Moron. And Andrew Leonard, a writer for Salon who also covers finance and economics, even has the gall to say that individuals “do not deserve all the blame for living beyond our means — we were encouraged to do so and seduced into doing so by a host of characters, from Alan Greenspan to the biggest Wall Street bankers to the incorrigible telemarketers who never stopped calling.” This abdication of personal responsibility makes me sick. I’m not going to deny that tons of Wall Street bigshots did horrendously stupid, reckless, greedy, reprehensible things. They too abdicated their fiduciary responsibility—they’d get huge bonuses for making huge profits, and huge golden parachutes for making huge losses, so why wouldn’t they want to ratchet up the risk, regardless of what was in the best interest of the shareholders? Passing off blame and responsibility is the easy way out, whether you’re a CEO or you’re run-of-the-mill middle class. It is your responsibility not to do stupid crap with your money. That means living within your means, whatever those means are.

2. I hate when people go out drinking every weekend, eat a fast-food lunch every day, etc., and then bitch about how they don’t have any money. Break out the PB&J or ramen noodles for lunch. And buy some two buck Chuck or Bud Light or whatever at the grocery store and get your drink on that way. Much, much cheaper than having to pay ridiculous prices for drinks at a bar. Or see movies on the weekdays when they’re cheaper. Or go to the library and check out books instead of going to Barnes & Noble. Or make coffee at home instead of drinking some overpriced Starbucks concoction. The list of simple things you can do to spend less is endless.

3. I hate when people don’t save their money. I hate it even more when they say they don’t have any money to save. Yes, there are lots of people in this world who can’t save any of their money. But if you have the internet at home, you probably don’t fall into that category. Like I just said, go out drinking less and save more. And the younger you are, the more important it is that you save. If you’re a high school or college student with a part time job, or you’re just out of college and have a job, it is incredibly important that you save as much as you can ASAP, before you have to spend it on things like spouses and children and broken air conditioning units. And the extra time for your investment to grow is hugely important. If you’re 25 and you invest $4,000 a year for ten years, you’d end up with more money at age 65 than someone who starts investing at 35 and invests for thirty years. It’s hard to believe, but true.* If you have a job you can start an IRA (which should probably be a Roth, unless you’re making six figures) no matter how young you are, and being able to let your money grow for 40 or 50 years is a really, really good thing.

4. I hate when people who do save their money do horribly stupid things with it. As many of y’all may know, I rather fortuitously came into a fairly large sum of money a few years ago, so I had to learn pretty quickly about the best ways to invest it. In the course of my education, I was shocked to see that the vast majority of Americans—even the vast majority of very intelligent, college-educated, middle- or upper-class Americans—do horrendously stupid things with their savings.

First of all, don’t try to pick stocks. If you have a bunch of money saved up and you want to take 5% of your portfolio and pick a few stocks, fine. But don’t think that you can out-research the thousands of people who run mutual funds and pension plans and university endowments by doing some research on yahoo or morningstar or whatever.

Along the same lines, don’t try to pick active mutual funds (in an active fund, you essentially hire some Wall Street suit—or these days, a Wall Street computer nerd—to compete in stock-picking contests with thousands of others equally smart, equally hard-working Wall Street suits and computer nerds). Some funds have done better than others, but that doesn’t means they’ll do better in the future—they may very well just have gotten lucky. You’ve probably heard the disclaimer, “Past performance is no guarantee of future results.” Nowhere is this more true than in investing. Maybe you get lucky and end up with a better-than-average fund, but it’s just as likely you’ll get unlucky—studies have consistently shown that a mutual fund that tops the charts, even over a five- or ten-year period, rarely stays at the top for the next five or ten years. And active funds have higher expenses. You’re much better off buying index funds from a low-cost company like Vanguard than trying to pick funds.** With index funds, you basically own a piece of every single company in the market—so you guarantee yourself an average return—which sounds ho-hum, but is actually pretty damn good. And since the costs are lower than the average mutual fund, you actually guarantee that you’ll perform better than the average investor.

Also, don’t panic! We’ve seen a nasty downturn lately, but selling when you’re down only locks in losses. What you need to do is develop a good mix of stocks and bonds depending on your age and various other factors, then stick with it over the long haul. Or, you can just select a fund that has a target date set for when you plan to retire, and it automatically changes its balance for you. If you have no clue what you’re doing, you don’t need to have a clue! Just buy whichever fund is closest to when you plan to retire. Investing done. It really is as simple as that. You don’t need to check the stock market every day and agonize about the economy. You just keep investing and let your money work for you.

If you’d like more info, the most comprehensive introductory book I know of is The Bogleheads’ Guide to Investing.*** An even easier read is The Coffeehouse Investor. You should be able to pick up either book at your local library.

And if you have any questions, feel free to ask. Obviously I’m no professional—though I did ponder switching to a finance major halfway through college—but I think the lack of knowledge about debt, investing, and personal finance is one of the most serious problems facing America. The mess we’re in right now would have been avoided had people saved their money and not piled debt on top of debt. So I’m happy to do what I can to help.

* Okay, given a very, very low enough interest rate it wouldn’t be true, but in all likelihood it will be.

** All of my mutual funds are at Vanguard and I can’t recommend them strongly enough. Unlike virtually all the other mutual fund companies out there, Vanguard is owned by its clients, not by a for-profit management firm. So the mutual funds’ only expenses are what it actually costs to run them—you’re not paying for a fund company’s profits. This means their expense ratios are a tiny fraction of what other companies charge.

*** The title comes from John Bogle, the founder of Vanguard and the originator of the first index fund. The devotees of his low-cost, long-term, index-heavy approach to investing call themselves “Bogleheads.”

For example, last year I wanted to buy a couple of Hornets tickets. They were having a special and selling some tickets for only $8. Bargain, right? So I go to buy the tickets from Ticketmaster, and while I realized there would be fees, I was pretty disgusted that the cheapest possible delivery option still left me paying $5.75 in fees on an EIGHT DOLLAR TICKET. Ridiculous. I realize the processing cost is the same (probably about twelve cents) regardless of the price of the ticket, but this is a little bit ridiculous.

But it gets worse.

What’s utterly baffling is that the cheapest cost was for them to mail me the tickets (I was buying weeks in advance, so I had that option). If I wanted to print the tickets out at home, it would cost me an extra $1.25. I’m pretty sure this violates all known theories of economics. I save them the cost of printing the tickets, I save them the cost of mailing the tickets, and for my kindness they want to charge me extra. I really wish some companies would give Ticketmaster some competition so they would cut this crap out.* Really, Ticketmaster? You want to charge more money for something that costs less? This is worse than Bernie Madoff or Enron or AIG. See this website, cleverly named ticketmastersucks, for more examples of outrageous fees.

And now I get their stupid e-mails every week, which just adds to the suffering. Okay, it doesn’t take me very long to delete them, and I’m sure I could unsubscribe somehow or another, but still. I’m not one of those anti-corporate pinko types, but if Ticketmaster could jump off a cliff and die, the world would be a much better place.

*For example, Telecharge and Ticketmaster each sell tickets for about half of the Broadway shows, and when I spend money on those I don’t get hosed as badly as when I buy anywhere else, where Ticketmaster has a huge monopoly.